2005 tape release from swedish noise artist Kristian Olsson. Comes in a plastic box with a 24 page booklet. Limited to 101 numbered copies.
Power electronics project from Sweden. Harsh industrial sounds mixed with offensive vocals. The result is powerful music which is truly against the modern world with all it’s false myths and false hopes.
A merciless onslaught of oppressive Industrial/Power Electronics. Live tracks from 1989-2000.
Debut 7''EP release by Christian Erdmann's TRIARII. Epic, bombastic martial music.
Extremely rare and limited 7''EP from one of the best martial bands around.
Freak Animal Records presents this release which offers ten original power electronics assaults with violent shouted vocals, leaving no doubt in the listener's mind that Brethren means every word. Each structured track on this American power electronics release takes on subjects deemed controversial and/or politically incorrect by today's standards. Brethren's outspoken political views are perfectly represented by the brutal electronics, thought provoking lyrics and provocative images.
Semen is a collaboration between Jakob Nybo (Hentai) and Henrik Nordvargr Björkk (MZ.412, Toroidh, Folkstorm). Hentai and Nordvargr ejaculate their audio semen into the cold electric womb, and watch in fear as an unnatural sonic offspring mutates, squirms in agony and slowly comes to life. A unique and extremely disturbing masterpiece of fleshy, cold and perverse avantgarde dark / death electronic soundscape nightmares.
When the likes of Masami Akita (MAZK, SUNN) and Henrik Nordvargr Björkk (FOLKSTORM, TOROIDH and MZ.412) get together, you know that you're in for something really special. This Japanese-Norwegian collaboration brings together two of the world's most well-respected Noise artists on possibly the only record label capable of carrying it all off.
Imagine a choral work performed in a cathedral of ice with distant rumblings of war and you have 'Miserere', the opening track of Peter Pettersson's second album as Sophia. The second and title track, 'Herbstwerk', is brutally penetrated by martial/industrial hammers. This seems to reflect real anger and sets the scene for much of the rest of the album.
Launched in the wake of the excellent 'Unity of Blood' EP, this latest release from Martin Bjorkman (Algaion) and Henry Moller (Puissance) is accompanied by images of defiant warriors and fallen soldiery. Europe's tragic past is regenerated for thirty-seven minutes of symphonic heaven. The Arditi, meaning the 'Daring Ones', was an elite commando unit operating in Italy between the wars.
There are many, possibly into the hundreds, of artists out there who specialise in the Power Electronics genre. Each day / week/ month / year another will join the throng and bung out what they consider to be the last word in this style of music. There is though one man, the big daddy, who firmly put this music on the map. Who over the years - and it goes back an awfully long time - has continually released the most obstinate and difficult music ever to come out of Sweden, if not the world. That icon of cool, the ultimate purveyor of noise is none other than Roger Karmanik. No one else has ever strived to not only put his own music out for everyone’s personal damnation but encouraged and released like minded souls through the Cold Meat Industry label. Though it must be quickly added, to stave off recriminations, that CMI releases music from many other different genres as well. He’s the man for all seasons. The consummate professional, although seeing the way he dressed in the last BDN live DVD outing ‘Disobey’ I do worry about him somewhat.
The begging of ‘Simmetria’ is a completely visual experience. It is as if a postindustrial world developed through ones eyes. The marching background, the broken beats splashed through the middle, bells, synthesized vocals and longing notes… One can almost feel the dead sand crunching under their feet while a city full of smoke, smog and fire unfolds in the valley below. Definitely this composition could become a soundtrack for some apocalyptic movie ‘One’ moves the pace higher up and introduces many new elements, move percussion, better-defined background voices and vibrant energy surrounding every blow. It takes a small step back to then be lounged forward with a reciting martial voice. The short seconds that include the voice recall late 80s industrial artists, transforming the song 180º into a crude wry line. Not to worry, for ‘Palace of Illusions’ comes in a grandiloquent epic way, with many female chorus voices and a steady trumpet line that gives the song a strong bellicose spirit – something that is encountered so obviously for the first time in the record at this moment. This statement is a perfect testimony of the different ranges found in the record.
‘Simmetria’ is Marcin Bachtiak’s fifth long play. Personally I think it is one of the most complete and variable. Obviously it can’t be compared to their previous work, ‘ORP Orzel’, which was absolutely thematic, oppressive and evolving. This new record is wider ranging, and it is also much wilder than what we had heard in the collaboration with Stahlwerk 9 and Rukkanor. Throughout its development, Cold Fussion takes the listener into different worlds, from the hectic martial sound to old school experimental industrial to a calm and gelid dark ambient.
The turning of a page comes with ‘Distant Impression’. The atmosphere is darker, claustrophobic at times. Every single detail comes sharply into light: the creeks, the clashes, the drum rolls, the hanging piano notes… This is not the end of the attack, though, and ‘Blue is the Flag’ proves itself worthy of the battlefield with its pulsating pace and martial spirited melodies. The reciting voice returns once again, as it appeared in ‘One’ yet in a much more story-telling way. Sort of as it was an epic adventure being composed, unfolding as it was being told. It shifts the record once again, as if the diversity in sings were weaving themselves together.
With ‘Into the Depth’ the atmosphere is the main character. The song pulsates and is full of contrasts: a light clear melody is crushed by the strong beat, the heavenly voices are surrounded by alarm cries and the entire song has a very rhythmical industrial feeling to it. It ends suddenly and is trapped in the absorbing epic spirit of ‘...And They Kept Marching’. At first I wasn’t attracted this song, I though it was too full of sound, too exaggerated, too baroque. Until I listened closely to the song as a whole: the threatening alarm is combined skillfully with a unique sense of apathy brought by the clearly digital construction. The voice is clearer than in previous songs, and the lyrics are highly understandable. ‘Simmetria’ follows, with a very complex start, bringing to mind some IDM or rhythmic industrial artists with the use of the pads and distortion in the synthesizer, yet it manages to remain in a midpoint between epic and avant-garde.
After the bizarre pause that ‘Simmetria’ becomes, ‘Melencolia’ appears. Including a sophisticated base line with intertwining percussion elements, the atmosphere flickers around them and a ghostly piano melody appears flightily. ‘Cold and Forgotten’ is a much more haunting composition. The sounds again speckle and disappear with the flicker of an eye. The guitar notes are like a backbone, as if they where the light in a dark industrial cement tunnel, with dark shadows menacing outside the light’s sphere. The entire song is organic, as if the machinery noises were breathing. The song becomes less menacing and more intimate as it grows. To close, ‘Sleepless Thoughts’ bring a surprising oriental spirit that had been flirted with in previous moments through the voice introductions. The sounds are crystalline, and crash into the song as drops. With the background noise, the sound of cables shaking in the wind comes to mind.
‘Simmetria’ has ups and downs, but as a whole it is a masterpiece, a canvas where the desperate wildness of Dubuffet mingles with the crude drawings of Bacon and Goya, under the wings of Devyatkin or Eisenstein. Cold Fusion’s composer can be proud – he himself has made War Office Propaganda climb another notch in the list of classic labels to admire.
Review taken from Heathen Harvest.
This is Namanax's first brain melting full-length, after the single 30 minute track EP Multi-Phase Electrodynamics, as well as the 21 minute track on Release Your Mind Vol. 1, and the 28 minute contribution to Exit 13's Ethos Musick in 1994. Cascading Waves... follows similiar lines in minimalist idealogy to the earliest recordings, yet does manage to be a little more diverse in shifting phases and tones. If "less is more" then Namanax is the ultimate in absolute minimal noise electronics.
Cosmic Industrial with elements of neoclassical music and power electronics. This release is inspired by theories connected to nazi occult researches and some actual events that took place at Neuschwabenland right after WWII.
A lesson in Industrial Noise/Power Electronics. 'nuff said.
This album is billed as the very last Folkstorm release, although the project itself has been scheduled to end on no less than two previous occasions. Flanked by charcoal-style sketches of noble peasants, slaves, slavemasters and agricultural rebellion, this CD - limited to 1500 copies and delayed for over two years - is a fitting epitaph to the Industrial legend that won't go away. Like a stubborn Michael Myers at a Hallowe'en bloodfest, Lord Nordvargr simply refuses to lay down and die.
"Reaping the Fallen" is the striking debut from Ordo Equilibrio, a duo who have added an intensely erotic and fetish-oriented tone to the genre of Dark Wave / Ambient music. The album combines a post-industrial ambiance and decadent flavor with a few acoustic Dark Folk anthems, all revolving in monotonous manner to create fascinating audio tapestries, where the slow drones seem to conceal moans and other peculiar sounds trapped underneath, which surface on occasion to match the sensual voice of Chelsea. One will find in her voice gracious eroticism in a heavy and imposing tone that sounds not only alluringly seductive, but also deeply obsessive, as if mesmerized by the cyclic sonority that evolves on the background. Somehow, a very 'physical' and 'visual' album, which combines an hypnotic mood with haunting and erotic soundscapes.
‘Blut und Boden’, blood and soil, life and the earth, a deeply intrinsic belief not just endemic to Germany and the oft-used ideology by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists, rather one that translocates into all cultures. Rasthof Dachau’s tractive charm is the ability to ritualise, to render aural cerements about the listener from agglutination of the interred in biers, catafalques and sepulchres, examining the passing into the next state of existence from such varied cultures. Heartbeat establishes the scene with pendant drones approaching like a flock of bombers before the flensing clangour unleashes, a noisome abrading of machine like pumping, almost as if the heart was replaced by primitive industrial engineering. Germanic vocal samples vociferate over nitid bubbling as diversion breaks the raucous pistoning chamber. Asiatic throat singing steeped in a subterrene grotto forms a dark ululating choir to the rill of running water before slumbering ambience and explosive symphony concatenates into turgid electronic rhythmic noise. Japanese taiko drums and chants peel indistinct in the smorgasbord of falling rain treated with irregular clatter and stop-start industrial motion.
The organic is represented not just by vocal tracts and carnivorous growls but by the entire process Rasthof Dachau approaches noise and electronics, aleatoric in its facets as much as life, but with one ultimate end. Frequencies swell and soar like coloratura over immured wraiths that flit and languish, the treads of tanks roll with percussive momentum into sinistral horizons where alien sirens reign. Ranging the gamut of castellated ambience and distinctive noise, Rasthof Dachau foment bleakness with onus of an organic decay.
Review taken from Heathen Harvest.
01 - ExitusDOWNLOAD
Password: aberrantsounds.blogspot.com
Cooperation 7''EP from both german acts. Limited to 150 handnumbered copies.
Yet another Cold Meat Industry compilation, and one of my faves. In "...And Even Wolves..." the music styles are quite varied; from the medieval/neoclassical sounds of Arcana to the death industrial of Mz.412, and from the eerie dark ambient of Aghast to the isolationist mood of Ordo Equilibrio. Enjoy.
"An interesting combination of Power Electronics, dark ambient and some minimal "Martial industrial" summarize as a whole this work from Schwadron.
"A classic powerelectronics, obscure ,violent, oppressive soundtrack for the gas chamber. A work inspired in the brutality and madness of the anti-semite persecution, idelology and extermination. To be listened at maximum volume."
Scott Candey, the moving spirit behind Gruntsplatter, describes his work as “... a malleable creature that hovers in the grey area between abrasive noise and dark ambient...”; you certainly won’t get any argument from me on that score. Candey seems to use Gruntsplatter as a means to spit bile, plague and acid on the virus that is humanity – there is often an undeniable misanthropy coursing through the veins of the musical beasts he engenders. Certainly on some of his previous outings, such as ‘The Death Fires’ and ‘Chronicling the Famine’, he laid bare that misanthropy in the rawest way possible. I must admit that I too harbour a distaste for the vast majority of the steaming pile of turds that claim to belong to the race of homo sapiens – sometimes their blinding stupidity leads me to believe that it is only by sheer luck that we have survived thus far. This is one of the reasons why I have a soft spot for the work of Gruntsplatter (plus I think the name is quite wonderfully evocative...). Once again we have harrowing and brooding death ambient atmospheres, cavernous and cathedral-like torch-lit spaces, filled with the ever-burning fires of madness and destruction and peopled by the vile architects of filth and defilement. The earth churns, groans, fractures along fault-lines and spews the hot bile of magma amidst the engines of mass annihilation, the very machines that will do the work of ridding the planet of the parasite that we have become. This is a culling and mass death on a gigantic industrial scale – what’s more there is nothing that we hold dear or have faith in, be it science, religion or military prowess, that will either save us or hold the legions back. Everything will be laid to waste, the earth burned, cities razed and civilisation brought to its knees and beyond. All that will be left will be scorched and blackened earth, unmourned ruins, and the still-smoking funeral pyres of the world we created – the wheels were set in motion long ages ago and however much we try to fight it there is a relentless inevitability about it.
What Candey seems to be saying is that this is our doom and there’s nothing we can do to defer its arrival at the appointed time. We don’t know how long we have left, but whether it is tomorrow, next year, next century or in ten million year’s time, the prognostication remains depressing – the cancer that is humanity will keep on running its destructive and antagonistic course along with its unwillingness to change or uplift itself. One can look upon Gruntsplatter’s music as either a warning or an anticipatory hymn to the eventual demise of the human race and all it represents – they may even stand as testament to those few individuals who possessed enough prescience to see our end coming. There’s definitely a part of me that would love to see the devils and demons dancing on the graves and piles of doomed humanity – I even hope they’ll let me join in with them. If they do, then some album or other of Gruntsplatter’s will be on my mp3 player at the time....
Review taken from Heathen Harvest.
The new Tribe Of Circle album has been a long time coming. Closing the trilogy begun with “Rien Ne Disparait Jamais Vraiment....” in 2000 musician Jean-Paul Antelmi returns with a fresh offering of bombastic looping exaltations. “Children of a Weakened God” continues the exploration of man, religion and God that was introduced in the two proceeding chapters. The third and final chapter in this industrial exploration of man and faith focuses upon the concept of God in the modern world. This discussion is one that fits well with martial emphasis given the radicalization of religious beliefs we are witnessing on all sides of the world today.
Finnish Power Electronics/Noise. Japan only 3"CDr release for the Grunt tour April 2005.